God's Home: The forecast is sunny with a chance for a change

Steve Raap

Old Guy loves a good snowfall as well as the next guy. But, hey, isn't this getting to be a bit much, folks?

I know. I know. We went without a decent amount of the white stuff for so long. Now we're just making up for lost time, you say. I think you may be right.

Then again, it just might be climate change.

Sorry. Sorry. I know you've had enough of that fool talk. But, I have to ask, were you listening?

My sister, wise beyond her years, has been following a very independent scientist for years. That scientist's name is James Lovelock. He lives in Cornwall, England.

Old Guy and Still-Young Bride spent a week in Cornwall on vacation in 1997. It's a charming region, not unlike our area. Just put the Atlantic Ocean where Lake Petenwell is and there you'd have it. But I digress.

Scientist Lovelock has had his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s. His claims to fame include holding some 50 patents, as well as inventing the Chloro Floro Carbon detecting device. That device helped to reveal the hole in the ozone layer. He also introduced the Gaia hypothesis. It's a theory, revolutionary in scope, that the Earth is a super-organism that should be self-regulating - if we'll just quit messing with it.

Yes, he's had his detractors. But Shell Oil executives were not among them. In 1965, they asked him to predict what the world would look like in the year 2000. He stated that the environment would be our main concern by then, not coincidentally, due in part to the actions of oil companies. Forty-nine years later, he takes little joy in knowing that his prediction has come true.

In his 2006 book, titled "The Revenge of Gaia," he predicted that by 2020, extreme weather would be our normal everyday pattern. It would cause devastation on a global scale. That devastation would be so massive that by 2040, Europe would be a desert, and London would be underwater. Yowza!

What can we do to keep that from happening? Not much, Lovelock believed then. Recycling? Reducing hydro-carbon release into the atmosphere? Wind farms? Adopting a green lifestyle? Lovelock said at that time that it's all too little and too late for those actions. He predicted we'd gone past the tipping point, that catastrophe was inevitable.

Today, James Lovelock is 94 years old. Since 2006, he has tempered his pessimism a bit. He admits he went too far in his predictions, that the degree of climate change has slowed, though not stopped or reversed itself.

Is there an upside to Lovelock's predictions? He notes that, similar to the actions taken by those countries who rallied to defeat Hitler, when faced with calamity, the human species will work together around a sense of purpose. That is the hope he will offer in his latest book, which will discuss how humanity can still help regulate the Earth's natural systems by changing the way it acts.